(This is the written version of a talk developed during 2020 between IsolaTed Talks, CIPR annual conference and the BMC podcast)
Last year, as I watched family, friends, clients, students, and myself adjust to the pandemic, I found myself thinking a lot about how people and organisations react to a crisis. The way they react shares a lot in common. Sometimes, our reactions shape us just as much as the crisis does.
Humans react to danger in instinctive and distinctive ways: fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Typically we show a predisposition to some over others. Evolutionary speaking, those mechanisms have positive roles too. To an extent, we can see them as ‘generic strategies’. To survive, our species needed this diversity. Taking the crisis heads on — fighters risk death. On the other hand, you can’t have a society of ‘flighters’ or they’ll run out of energy or options and die out too. Rigid templates weren’t enough even in prehistoric times. What remains is that when stress is high, people switch to ‘survival mode’ and default to their ‘type’, with the feelings that come with it — the fighters get angry, the flighters feel fear and anxiety, and so on. The go-to templates tend to become even more entrenched when a combination of high or persistent stress results in trauma. This type of rigid behavioural pattern is, in fact, an attribute of PTSD.
Organisations are like people in that sense. Once traumatised, even if the automatic response originally aided survival, it becomes ingrained. And then you get what I call ‘the post-traumatic organisation’.
Here are some symptoms I’m sure you’ll find familiar:
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